THE 1998 CAMPAIGN: GOVERNOR

THE 1998 CAMPAIGN: GOVERNOR; Democrat Faces Daunting Battle In Governor's Race in New York

By RICHARD PEREZ-PENA

Published: September 16, 1998

Trouncing his opponents in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, Peter F. Vallone, the New York City Council Speaker, who has never won office outside his Queens district, propelled himself yesterday into a far more daunting struggle against Gov. George E. Pataki.

Mr. Pataki, a first-term Republican, enjoys wide popularity and faces none of the voter unrest that sent scores of incumbents into retirement in 1994. Mr. Vallone has less than $1 million left in his campaign treasury, while Mr. Pataki, one of the most prodigious fund-raisers in the nation, has well over $10 million. And Mr. Vallone does not have the Liberal Party nomination, without which no Democrat has won statewide office in half a century.

As a moderate on social issues who preaches fiscal conservatism, Mr. Vallone, 63, is his party's most centrist gubernatorial nominee in a generation or more, a potential advantage at a time when many Democratic voters have turned away from the left.

But he enters the general election campaign with less stature statewide than any Democratic gubernatorial nominee since at least 1966. Since then, the party's standard-bearers have been Arthur J. Goldberg, a former Justice of the Supreme Court, Hugh L. Carey and Mario M. Cuomo.

Such obstacles did not temper Mr. Vallone's enthusiasm as he lit into Mr. Pataki in a victory speech to supporters at the Grand Hyatt hotel in mid-Manhattan, and tied the Governor to his less-popular mentor, Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato.

''In the last four years, Pataki has increased the state's debt by $20 billion,'' he said. ''We have to put our fiscal house in order and end the days of George Pataki and Al D'Amato's fiscal recklessness.''

With a tweak at Mr. Pataki's paid speechmaking, he said, ''I challenge you to one debate for every out-of-state speech you've given.''

With 96 percent of precincts reporting, Mr. Vallone had 397,486 votes or 56 percent; Lieut. Gov. Betsy McCaughey Ross had 148,547 votes or 21 percent; the Brooklyn District Attorney, Charles J. Hynes, had 110,385 votes or 16 percent, and James L. Larocca, a former state transportation commissioner, had 55,125 votes or 8 percent.

Ms. McCaughey Ross, a constitutional scholar who entered politics just four years ago, conceded defeat at 10 P.M. to her supporters at the Inter-Continental Hotel in mid-Manhattan. But she claimed a victory of sorts in focusing the race on issues like prekindergarten schooling, health care and child care.

''This gubernatorial contest is better for what we have already done,'' she said. ''The entire gubernatorial contest is more relevant to the lives of families, of working men and women and their children, than it would have been if we had not entered this race.''

She said there was ''no question'' she would continue campaigning as the nominee of the Liberal Party, which would earn her the animosity of many Democrats. Many of the Democrats who worked for her campaign planned to abandon it if she lost the primary.

Ms. McCaughey Ross never shook off the images left by her unorthodox political career, or her well-publicized money troubles in the stretch run. Her campaign was also hobbled by dissension that saw several top officials depart.

In an effort to seize the interest of voters who seemed either distracted from the contest or bored by it, Ms. McCaughey Ross turned in the final week to attacking Mr. Vallone, questioning his commitment to abortion rights and education.

The attacks were part of an overt appeal for women's votes, but exit polls conducted by Edison Media Research showed that she fared little better among women than men.

In the exit polls, 9 out of 10 primary voters said that more women should be elected to government. But only one-fifth of those said they had voted for Ms. McCaughey Ross.

In the primary for lieutenant governor, Sandra Frankel, a town supervisor from the Rochester area, easily beat Charlie King, a Manhattan lawyer, and Clyde Rabideau, the Mayor of Plattsburgh, whom Mr. Vallone had called his preferred choice.

With 96 percent of precincts reporting, Ms. Frankel had 50 percent of the vote to 33 percent for Mr. King and 17 percent for Mr. Rabideau.

Mr. Vallone's victory was strikingly broad, cutting across divisions of race, sex, age, income, education, religion and region. Exit polls indicated that he even defeated Ms. McCaughey Ross by almost 2 to 1 in upstate New York, where he was virtually unknown six months ago.

The Council Speaker may actually be better known than Mr. Pataki was at this time four years ago, when he was a first-term State Senator. But Mr. Vallone lacks a crucial advantage Mr. Pataki had in 1994: the backing of Mr. D'Amato, who helped his fellow Republican raise $14 million.

Mr. Vallone carries into the seven-week general election campaign the burden of the assumption, shared even by many in the party, that the Governor is unbeatable.

Fewer than half the Democratic primary voters who were interviewed said they believed that Mr. Pataki would lose in November, compared with more than three-fifths who thought Senator D'Amato would be defeated.

That pessimism has hung like a pall over the Democratic side of the race from the start. Last year, the two Democrats who were viewed as the strongest potential challengers to Mr. Pataki bowed out, Representative Charles E. Schumer to run for Senate and State Comptroller H. Carl McCall to run for re-election.

The campaign against Mr. Pataki could be further complicated by the presence of two well-known minor-party candidates on the Nov. 3 ballot who could splinter the anti-Pataki vote.

Ms. McCaughey Ross is the Liberal Party nominee, and B. Thomas Golisano, a wealthy Rochester businessman, is running for the second time on the Independence Party line.

The contest has stirred great interest only through the soap-operatic travails of Ms. McCaughey Ross, Mr. Pataki's one-time protegee, who engaged in a highly public feud with him and who switched only last year from Republican to Democrat. Throughout the primary contest, the three other candidates have questioned the sincerity of her conversion and her positions.

On Sept. 2, she confirmed what Democrats had long suspected, that her husband, Wilbur L. Ross, an investment banker, would not provide anywhere near the $10 million for her campaign that she had predicted. Mr. Ross withdrew half the $4 million he had given to her candidacy.

Yesterday, Mr. Ross, who has had little to say publicly about the matter, released a terse statement saying, ''My office has received a number of phone calls from reporters today, so I wanted to let members of the media know that I voted for Betsy today prior to going out of state on a business trip.''

Mr. Vallone spent more than $3 million on the primary, while Mr. Hynes and Mr. Larocca spent less than $1 million between them.

Mr. Vallone, a lifelong resident of Astoria, Queens, has spent most of his years in and around city politics. The son of a judge, he was a lawyer in private practice, ran for Congress in 1972 -- his only electoral loss -- and was elected to the City Council in 1973. Since 1986, he has been chief of the Council, the second-most-powerful post in city government.

Through much of the year, even as polls showed Ms. McCaughey Ross leading, Mr. Vallone largely ignored her, confident that voters would conclude that he was the only viable Democratic candidate.

Primary voters may have got the message; in exit polls, they overwhelmingly chose him as the Democrat with the best chance of beating Mr. Pataki.

The opinion polls began swinging Mr. Vallone's way in midsummer, and he established a solid lead in the last month, when he began broadcasting television ads.

Photos: Peter F. Vallone, the City Council Speaker, with his wife, Tena Marie Vallone, after his primary victory last night, and Lieut. Gov. Betsy McCaughey Ross, with her daughter Amanda, after her concession speech. (Keith Meyers/The New York Times; Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times)(pg. B8)